It did not begin with the light we associate with joy. It did not begin with a chorus of alleluias. It began in darkness. It began with tears. And it began with a string – ludicrous almost – a string of muddled mistakes and misconceptions.
First of all, Mary thinks Jesus’ body has been stolen, carried off by grave robbers, so she ends up with swollen eyes, crying a river of tears because the body of her Lord and Teacher is gone, vanished.
When Peter arrives on the scene, he has the hutzpa to actually venture into the tomb, but he sees only emptiness and absence and the linen wrappings set in a crumpled pile with the cloth which had covered Jesus’ face folded neatly at the back of the cave. All Peter can muster up is a shake of the head and a thoughtful pull of the beard. He does not have a clue what is going on and so just turns around and goes back home to bed.
Peter’s unnamed buddy only sticks his head into the cave, maybe because he was overwhelmed by that creepy feeling you often get when you enter a cemetery in the dark. Yet, for some reason he believed (though John never tells us exactly what he believed). However, he sees no reason to stick around either, so he also goes back to bed - or maybe just ventures out to get his morning coffee.
So Mary ends up – again - in the garden alone while the dew is still on the roses. Well, not exactly alone because there is someone else there. It is Jesus – we know that – but she thinks he is the gardener. Then when she figures out who the stranger is, she throws herself at him, bent on an enormous bear hug, and he puts out his arm to fend her off, telling her she can not touch, she can not cling.
When you come right down to it, the whole empty tomb story is a pretty inauspicious and fragile way to begin a religion that has ended up lasting over 2000 years. I mean, the four canonical gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) can not even agree on what happened that morning. I mean, if you lined up all the versions side by side, you would see a whole bunch of conflicting details.
And yet, each Easter, we insist upon focusing our energy on that pile of rocks in the garden. As Episcopal priest and religion professor, Barbara Brown Taylor writes, our concern is “on that tomb, on that morning, on what did or did not happen there and how to explain it to anyone who does not happen to believe it too.
The resurrection is the one and only event in Jesus’ life that was entirely between him and God. There were no witnesses whatsoever. No one on earth can say what happened inside that tomb, because no one was there. They all arrived after the fact. Two of them saw clothes. One of them saw angels. Most of them saw nothing at all because they were still in bed that morning, but as it turned out that did not matter because the empty tomb was not the point.”
It is a waste of our energy to try to rationally figure out this resurrection business. So if you came here wondering if (or maybe even hoping that) I would have some new insight into constructing a logical synthesis of that first Easter morning, then you will be deeply disappointed. For myself, I fall back on the whole faith thing – though I know for at least some of you, that does not cut the mustard.
But you are here. You chose to be here. You could have stayed at home and enjoyed another pot of tea and a second hot cross bun. Ok – maybe you felt pressured by tradition or a spouse, but you exercised your free choice and came to sit in these not always comfortable pews this morning. In the end, the story means something to you – even if it is only a large question mark in your psyche.
So – if the empty tomb is not the point, then what is? Well, unfortunately, most of us get our second go at the story misconstrued as well because we keep trying to squash it into some conventional box, and it just will not fit. We end up thinking that the resurrection has something to do with us – and where we will end up spending eternity.
And so we listen to this story of the empty tomb and manage to catapult ourselves out of the present, out of this world, and into another place where we will someday not be dead – maybe thirty pounds lighter with washboard abs, blond or at least with a full head of hair – but not dead.
And lo and behold, the story of the empty tomb – the resurrection - becomes not about Jesus, but rather about us. And I do not think that is what the Gospel writer of John had in mind. That may have been a theology that developed in the early church, but the plain language of the text is not about our resurrection.
So, if the empty tomb is not the point, and our own twisting of the story to make it about us in the eternal future is not the point, then what is the point?
New Testament scholar and Anglican Bishop of Durham in England puts it this way. “The point is…(that) Easter has burst into our world—the world of space, time, and matter, real history and real people and real life.” If Easter is about us at all, it is about us in the here and now, in this world – not in the next.
Maybe that is why the Gospel writer of John chose to set his story in the garden with a weeping Mary – to remind us that Jesus lives in THIS world, in OUR world which, when you come right down to it, is not all that different from Mary’s world. There is fear. Sometimes there is only emptiness and absence. Everyday people cry a river of tears over one thing or another.
You see, the profound hope of the resurrection is that not only did Jesus die in this world but Jesus lives in this world too. However, that being said (and as Jesus told Mary), we can not cling. We can not hang onto the hem of his robe and hope that he will fly us away to some better place.
Because, you know, the Risen Christ has places to go and people to see – here, in this world. The One who Lives is among the living, loving the living. The question that should stump us at Easter is not: Do you believe in the doctrine of the resurrection?
The question that is really raised in the Gospel narrative is: Have you encountered a Risen Christ? Have you encountered Love – with a capital “L”? You see, because if you have encountered the latter, then you have encountered him.
In the Gospel of John particularly, the writer goes to great lengths to tell stories of Jesus appearing to his disciples – in an upper room in a house in Jerusalem, on the beach, over breakfast cooked on an open fire – and each time, as Barbara Brown Taylor notes, his friends “became stronger, wiser, kinder, more daring. Every time he came to them, they became more like him.”
And, that is the only proof of the resurrection that we can offer. When we live as Jesus challenged as to live, when we live in loving community, when we forgive, when we become reconciled with those who have pushed us away, when we practice compassion, when we are advocates for justice, something happens to us. The sum of the parts seems to be greater than the whole.
And (and this is the secret, the mystery, the miracle of Easter) the sum of the parts is greater than the whole – because He is present. He is present in the love, in the forgiveness, in the reconciliation, in the moments we fought for justice. Maybe we do not see him (chances are we will not), but by golly, if we allow ourselves to indulge in something beyond the rational, we will feel his presence – because he lives. Because there were no grave robbers. Because he was in that garden. Because He is risen. He is risen indeed.
Rev. Nancy Foran is pastor of the Raymond Village Community Church, Raymond, Maine
http://www.rvccme.org/
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